How Companies Are Approaching AI’s Cost-Benefit Analysis

Google Cloud pulled out all the stops at its annual developer conference in Las Vegas this week to demonstrate that customers are getting good results from artificial intelligence services, speeding up production and offering new services to customers. But as tariffs roil markets and dampen the economic outlook, how much businesses spend on AI remains the biggest question.

David Glick, senior vice president of enterprise business services at Walmart, spoke glowingly of Google’s generative AI products on a Google-organized panel at the conference on Wednesday. He said it took just days to create an AI agent that would take information from a database and put it into a PowerPoint, a task that used to take Walmart employees two hours per customer and could now be done in “five seconds.”